BEXUS 3

Campaign information BEXUS 3 (2005)

BEXUS is a yearly recurring experimental flight with a stratospheric balloon that the students at Kiruna Space and Environment Campus carry out together with pupils from Hjalmar Lundboms school and the space high school, rymdgymnasiet. Implementation will be in cooperation with Esrange, which normally has scientists from all over the world as its clients.

Students from different years and courses are involved in the project, which means that different groups of students meet and get a chance to work together on the basis of their respective areas of competence. It is the students themselves who lead, design and build the experiments and the instruments destined for the balloon launch. Most of the data to be collected during the balloon flight will be used later in the courses.

The auxillary release technique will be used. After lift off, the balloon will ascend to about ~12 hPa (~27km) ceiling. Ceiling will be maintained as long as possible achieving maximum range for testing the E-Link performance. Cut down will be executed based on calculations for a safe landing. No slow descent is required. Flight trajectory calculations before time of launch will indicate if the cut down will be inside Sweden or in Finland.

The objective is to strengthen the co-operation between the space educations in Kiruna and to give the students inspiration to participate in space related projects.

The 10 000 m³ balloon type Zodiac 10 ZL, was successfully launched at 15:21 UTC on the 22 of March.The balloon reached an altitude of 28,5 km after 1 ½ hour of flight time. The cut down command was given at 19:40 UTC and the landing took place 43 km west of the village of Vilhelmina. The range of the high speed data link was more than 400 km.

Student Gondolas

Gondola 1The Chemical Power High Altitude Experiment (CPHAE) by Institutionen för Rymdvetenskap will study the behaviour of fuel cells and Zinc-air batteries during different atmospheric conditions.

Gondola 2The Multi Purpose Experiment Gondola (MPEG) by Institutionen för Rymdvetenskap will test a newly developed platform including a databus and housekeeping system prepared for future student experiments.

One box with passive experiments by Hjalmar Lundboms skolan and one by Rymdgymnasiet in Kiruna will be included and strapped together with one main student gondolas.

Esrange Gondola

The E-Link system will be tested with maximum data load versus achieved flight range.

One new ARGOS-GPS unit for positioning and localisation will be tested.